Part II: The Three Positions

Chapter 4

The Passible God

Neoclassical Theism and the Case for a God Who Feels

Introduction: Another Way Forward

In the previous chapter, we explored the classical vision of the impassible God — a God of perfect, undisturbed bliss who cannot be acted upon by anything outside Himself. We saw how this vision is supported by a powerful package of interlocking divine attributes: timelessness, immutability, simplicity, and aseity. We also noted the serious problems this position creates. If God cannot be emotionally affected by His creatures, what becomes of His love? If nothing in creation can touch His inner life, what happens to over four hundred passages of Scripture that describe a God who genuinely grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, and overflows with compassion?

This chapter presents the alternative. It introduces a position called neoclassical theism — a family of views that takes the biblical portrait of God's emotional life seriously while preserving everything that genuinely matters about God's sovereignty, goodness, and self-sufficiency. The neoclassical theist says: God truly feels. He is genuinely affected by His creatures. His emotional life is real, dynamic, and responsive to what happens in the world. And none of this makes God weak, dependent, or out of control. Quite the opposite — it shows us a God whose perfection includes the perfection of love.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: neoclassical theism argues that God is genuinely affected by His creatures, experiences real emotional change over time, and has experiential knowledge that grows as He interacts with creation — all without compromising His sovereignty, goodness, or self-sufficiency. I believe the case for this position is strong. In fact, I believe it offers a more biblically faithful, philosophically coherent, and pastorally powerful vision of God than strict classical impassibility ever could.

Before we dig in, we need to be clear about what neoclassical theism is — and what it is not. It is not process theology. Process theology, as we will see in Chapter 5, goes much too far. It makes God dependent on the world, denies that God created everything from nothing, and strips God of His ability to guarantee the outcome of history. Neoclassical theism rejects all of that. It is also not open theism, which denies that God knows future free choices. I reject open theism. The God of neoclassical theism knows everything — past, present, and future — exhaustively and completely.¹

So what is neoclassical theism? It is the broad family of views that modifies certain elements of classical theism — specifically, the claims about strict timelessness, strict immutability, strict simplicity, and strict impassibility — while keeping everything the Bible actually teaches about God's greatness: His omnipotence, His omniscience, His moral perfection, His aseity (which means He does not need anything outside of Himself to exist), and His sovereignty over all things. The key modification is this: neoclassical theism rejects the classical claim that God is utterly unaffected by creation. Instead, it affirms that God is genuinely responsive, genuinely relational, and genuinely emotionally engaged with the creatures He has made.²

Defining Divine Passibility: Three Senses

If we are going to argue that God is passible — that He can be genuinely affected — we need to be precise about what we mean. The word "passible" can be slippery, and different thinkers use it in different ways. Thankfully, theologians have identified at least three distinct senses of passibility. J. D. Kim, drawing on earlier work by O. C. Quick, lays out these three senses clearly.³

The first sense is external passibility. This refers to the capacity to be acted upon by something outside oneself. Can anything outside of God reach Him, touch Him, influence His inner life? The classical theist says no — God is completely self-contained and impervious to any outside influence. The passibilist says yes — God can be and is genuinely acted upon by His creatures, though always in a way that He freely permits and sovereignly controls.

The second sense is internal passibility. This refers to the capacity for changing emotional states within a single conscious being. Can God's inner emotional life change? Can He transition from joy to grief, from patience to anger, from delight to sorrow? The classical theist says no — any such change would imply imperfection, since change must be either from better to worse or from worse to better, and God is already perfect. The passibilist says yes — God's emotional states genuinely change in response to what happens in the world, but this does not compromise His perfection. His character, His purposes, and His essential nature remain rock-solid. What changes are His relational states — and that is precisely what love requires.

The third sense is sensational passibility. This refers to the capacity to experience something like pleasure and pain. Can God genuinely experience delight? Can He genuinely experience something analogous to suffering? The classical theist is nervous about this, because pleasure and pain sound too much like physical sensations — and God does not have a body. The passibilist responds: pleasure and pain are not merely physical. A parent who watches her child suffer experiences real anguish even if her own body is perfectly healthy. God, who is spirit, can experience the deepest joy and the profoundest sorrow without any physical sensation at all, because emotions are fundamentally about evaluation, care, and response — not about nerve endings.⁴

I affirm all three senses of passibility, though each one needs careful qualification. God can be acted upon by His creatures, but never against His will and never in a way that overwhelms or destabilizes Him. God's emotional states genuinely change, but His essential nature — His holiness, love, power, wisdom, and goodness — never changes. God can experience something like pleasure and pain, but these are not physical sensations. They are the deep, rational, purposeful emotional responses of a perfectly wise and perfectly loving God. As Roberto Sirvent has argued, this kind of emotional vulnerability is not a weakness — it is what love requires.⁵

Richard Creel, an important philosopher of religion, put it this way: to say that God is impassible is to say that He is completely self-sufficient and that nothing conditions Him.⁶ But the passibilist disagrees. She says that while God's existence and essential nature are entirely self-sufficient, God has freely chosen to create a world in which He genuinely responds to His creatures. He conditions everything else, yes — but He has also freely opened Himself to being genuinely affected by what He has made. This is not a sign of weakness. It is the overflow of a love so perfect that it refuses to remain detached.

The Neoclassical Package: How the Attributes Fit Together

In Chapter 3, we saw how the classical attributes form an interlocking package. Timelessness reinforces immutability. Immutability reinforces simplicity. Simplicity reinforces impassibility. Pull one thread, and the whole fabric is affected. The same is true of the neoclassical modifications. They also form an interlocking package — and understanding how they fit together is essential to grasping the passibilist position. R. T. Mullins provides one of the clearest accounts of how these neoclassical attributes work together.⁷

Existence and Essence

The neoclassical theist begins exactly where the classical theist does. God is a necessarily existent being. His existence and His essential nature do not depend on anything outside of Himself. God is a se — a Latin phrase that means He exists "from Himself." He is self-sufficient. He did not need to create the world. He did not need human beings. Nothing in creation adds anything to God that was missing from His essential nature.⁸

Where the neoclassical theist disagrees is over which attributes belong in God's essentially perfect nature. The classical theist includes timelessness, immutability, simplicity, and impassibility. The neoclassical theist argues that these are not perfections at all. Instead, God's essential nature includes attributes like omnipotence (all power), omniscience (all knowledge), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), and freedom. These are the true perfections — and they do not require timelessness, strict immutability, or impassibility.⁹

Mullins also draws a helpful distinction between the possession of a power and the exercise of a power. God possesses maximal power simply by being God — but He does not have to exercise that power in any particular way in order to possess it. God can freely choose how, when, and where to exercise His power according to His wisdom and goodness. This distinction matters because it means that God can act in genuinely new ways without ever gaining or losing any essential attribute. He is always maximally powerful, even when He freely chooses not to use His power in some particular situation.¹⁰

Temporality

Here is where the neoclassical position begins to depart from the classical one in significant ways. The neoclassical theist says that God is eternal — He exists without beginning and without end. Everyone agrees on this much. But the classical theist adds that God exists without succession: He experiences no "before" and "after," no sequence of moments. He exists in one unchanging, timeless "now." The neoclassical theist rejects this. She says that God does experience temporal succession. He has a genuine "before" and "after" in His life as He freely acts, creates, responds, and interacts with His creatures over time.¹¹

Why does this matter for the question of divine emotion? Because genuine emotional responsiveness requires some form of temporal experience. If God exists in one unchanging, timeless moment, He cannot genuinely transition from delight to grief when one of His children turns away. He cannot genuinely move from patience to righteous anger when sin reaches a tipping point. He cannot genuinely experience the joy of a sinner's repentance as a new event in His life. All of these responses require succession — a "before" and an "after." The everlasting God of neoclassical theism can genuinely experience these transitions because He lives through time, acting and responding in an ongoing relational history with His creation. (For a more detailed treatment of this topic, see my companion book, The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality, which argues at length that God is genuinely temporal.)¹²

Mutability

With the rejection of strict timelessness comes the rejection of strict immutability. If God exists in time and performs genuinely new actions, then He is not immutable in the strict classical sense — the sense that rules out any change whatsoever. The neoclassical theist sees this as a feature, not a bug. God's power and freedom require the ability to change in certain respects, such as becoming the Creator and Savior of the universe.¹³

Now, many theologians worry at this point. If God can change, couldn't He change for the worse? Couldn't He stop being good, or stop being loving, or even cease to exist? The neoclassical theist has clear answers to all of these worries. God's necessary existence means He can never cease to exist. His self-sufficiency means His essential attributes are not dependent on or derived from anything outside of Himself. Essential attributes cannot be gained or lost — that is what makes them essential. So it is absolutely impossible for the mutable God to stop being maximally good, maximally powerful, or maximally loving. God changes in His relational states, in His actions, and in His emotional responses — but never in His character, His nature, or His purposes.¹⁴

Unity Rather Than Strict Simplicity

We noted in Chapter 3 that strict divine simplicity — the idea that all of God's attributes are identical to each other and to His essence — creates serious problems. If God's love is literally identical to His wrath, and both are identical to His justice, and all three are identical to His essence, then we cannot meaningfully distinguish between them. God's anger at sin and God's mercy toward sinners become the same thing viewed from different angles. Most people find this deeply puzzling, and I believe rightly so.

The neoclassical theist opts for divine unity instead of strict simplicity. God's attributes are not identical to each other, but they are unified. As Mullins explains, they are coextensive — you will never find God's power operating apart from His wisdom, or His love operating apart from His justice. And they are compossible — all of God's attributes are internally consistent with one another. They never conflict.¹⁵

This matters enormously for the question of divine emotion. If God's love is genuinely different from God's anger (even though both flow from His holy nature), then God can be angry at child abuse precisely because He loves children. These two emotional responses are not identical. They are different — but they are harmonious, both flowing from the same morally perfect character. On strict simplicity, you cannot make this distinction. On divine unity, you can — and the result is a portrait of God that is both more coherent and more biblical.

The neoclassical theist also affirms that God is really related to His creation. The classical doctrine of divine simplicity denies that God has any accidental properties (properties that God acquires through His free actions) and entails that God is not really related to creation. The neoclassical theist disagrees. When God freely creates the universe, He genuinely acquires the property Creator. When God enters into covenant with Israel, He genuinely acquires the relational property covenant partner. These are real relations, not mere descriptions from our side. God is genuinely involved with His world.¹⁶

Passibility

With temporality, mutability, and divine unity in place, passibility follows naturally. Like the classical theist, the neoclassical theist insists that God's emotions are always rational and based on sound moral judgments. The Moral Inconsistency Criterion (any emotion that leads to morally inappropriate action cannot be attributed to God) and the Rational Inconsistency Criterion (any emotion involving an irrational evaluation cannot be attributed to God) — both discussed in Chapter 2 — are fully affirmed by the passibilist.¹⁷

Where the passibilist disagrees with the classical theist is over the Blessedness Criterion — the claim that any emotion that disrupts God's perfect happiness cannot be attributed to God. The passibilist rejects this criterion. She maintains that God can be moved and influenced by things external to His nature — because God has freely created a world in which He is genuinely responsive to His creatures. God is as happy as one can be in any given situation. But His happiness can be genuinely disturbed by what happens in the world, because a morally perfect God cannot be unmoved by the evils of the world.¹⁸

Think about it this way. Imagine a father who watches his child being bullied at school. This father is strong, wise, capable, and secure in himself. He is not emotionally fragile. But he hurts for his child. His heart aches. His joy is interrupted by real grief. Is this a deficiency? Is this father less perfect because he is emotionally affected by his child's pain? Of course not. We would say the opposite — a father who watched his child suffer and felt nothing at all would be deeply deficient. His emotional responsiveness is a perfection, not a flaw. The passibilist says the same is true of God. God's emotional responsiveness to His creatures' joy and suffering is not a weakness — it is what it means for God to be love.¹⁹

Mullins captures this well. The passibilist says that God cares deeply for the universe He has made. He knows the value of His creation and has declared it "very good" (Genesis 1:31). He greatly values His covenant people. He considers them worthy of His attention and action, and so He is emotionally responsive to them. When they are unfaithful, God is genuinely grieved, because He correctly perceives the destruction their sin is causing. When they suffer, God feels genuine sorrow, because He loves them and wants them to flourish. The passibilist claims that God's emotional responses perfectly track the values in reality — and precisely because they do, they are both rational and moral. They are the responses of a perfect moral agent to a world He has made and loves.²⁰

The Argument from Omniscience: Experiential Knowledge

One of the most powerful arguments for divine passibility comes from a surprising place: the doctrine of omniscience itself. This argument, developed at length by Mullins, contends that the passible God is actually more omniscient than the impassible God — because His knowledge includes a dimension that the classical God's knowledge lacks.²¹

To understand this argument, we need to distinguish between two very different kinds of knowledge. The first is propositional knowledge — knowing that something is the case. A doctor can know that her patient has a broken leg. She can know the precise location of the fracture, the type of break, the treatment plan, and the expected recovery time. All of this is propositional knowledge — knowledge of facts.

The second kind of knowledge is experiential knowledge — knowing what something is like from personal experience. The doctor knows all the facts about the broken leg. But only the patient knows what it feels like to have a broken leg. There is something that it is like to experience a sharp, searing pain shooting through your tibia. No amount of reading medical textbooks can give you that knowledge. You have to experience it.

Philosophers have a famous thought experiment to illustrate this distinction. Imagine a brilliant scientist named Mary who has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room. She has never seen any colors other than black and white. But Mary has read everything there is to read about color. She knows all the physics of light wavelengths. She knows all the neuroscience of how the brain processes color. She knows every propositional fact about the color red. But she has never seen red.

Now imagine that one day, Mary leaves her room and sees a red rose for the first time. Does her knowledge grow? Many philosophers say yes — emphatically. She has not learned any new propositional facts. But she has gained experiential knowledge — she now knows what it is like to see the color red. And that is a genuinely new kind of knowledge that she did not have before.²²

The passibilist applies this to God as follows. If there is experiential knowledge to be had in the world, and if God is truly omniscient, then God must have it. An omniscient God must know all there is to know — and that includes knowing things beyond mere propositions. God must have experiential knowledge as well. When God creates the universe, there is something that it is like for God to experience creating out of nothing. When God watches His children struggle, there is something that it is like for Him to grieve for them. When a sinner repents and turns back to Him, there is something that it is like for God to rejoice. This experiential knowledge is not reducible to propositional knowledge — it is a genuine, irreducible dimension of what it means to know.²³

Here is the problem for the impassibilist. If God is strictly impassible — if He cannot be affected by anything external to His nature — then His knowledge of human suffering is purely propositional. He knows that His creatures suffer. He knows the causes of their suffering. He knows when and how it will end. But He does not know what it is like to suffer with them, because He cannot be affected by anything outside Himself. His knowledge, while vast, has a gap.

The passible God, by contrast, has no such gap. Because He is genuinely responsive to His creatures, He knows their suffering not just as a set of facts but from the inside — experientially. He knows what it is like to grieve when a child dies, because He grieves with the parents. He knows what it is like to feel righteous anger at injustice, because He burns with that anger Himself. His experiential knowledge grows as He engages with His creation in new ways over time.²⁴

Now, the classical theist might respond: God's propositional knowledge is so perfect and so exhaustive that it encompasses everything experiential knowledge could provide. God does not need to experience something in order to know it perfectly. But the passibilist finds this unconvincing. Propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge are genuinely different kinds of knowledge. Knowing every fact about the color red is not the same as seeing red. Knowing every fact about pain is not the same as feeling pain. If experiential knowledge is real — and most philosophers agree that it is — then a God who lacks it is less than fully omniscient, no matter how vast His propositional knowledge may be.²⁵

There is another important dimension to this argument. Mullins points out that the neoclassical theist also believes God's knowledge includes tensed propositions — knowledge about what was true, what is true right now, and what will be true in the future. As God sustains the universe from moment to moment, the truth values of tensed propositions constantly change. A proposition like "the Battle of Gettysburg is happening right now" was true on July 1, 1863, but is not true today. The neoclassical theist argues that God tracks these changes perfectly — His knowledge is dynamically updated as history unfolds. The classical theist, who holds that God exists in one timeless "now," has a harder time explaining how God can know tensed truths, since timelessness seems to rule out any genuine "before" and "after" in God's cognitive life. In this sense, the neoclassical theist argues that her God knows more than the classical God in two different ways: He has experiential knowledge as well as propositional knowledge, and He has tensed knowledge as well as timeless knowledge.⁵⁰

The classical theist has several responses available, and we should consider them fairly. Some classical theists argue that God's timeless knowledge somehow includes the content of tensed propositions — God knows "timelessly" what creatures know "temporally." Others argue that experiential knowledge is not a genuine kind of knowledge but merely a subjective quality that adds nothing to true understanding. Still others argue that God's perfect propositional knowledge is so exhaustive that it encompasses everything experiential knowledge could provide. The passibilist finds each of these responses less than satisfying. If experiential knowledge is genuinely different from propositional knowledge — if knowing every fact about the color red really is different from seeing red — then no amount of propositional knowledge can substitute for it. The distinction is not about quantity (how many facts you know) but about kind (what sort of knowledge you have). And if an omniscient God must have every kind of knowledge that exists, then He must have experiential knowledge too.⁵¹

This argument has important pastoral implications as well. When we cry out to God in our suffering, we are not merely informing Him of facts He already knows. We are reaching out to a God who understands — who knows what it is like, who enters into our experience, who feels something of what we feel. That is why Hebrews 4:15 says of Jesus: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin" (ESV). The word "sympathize" — the Greek is sympathēsai (συμπαθῆσαι), from which we get our English word "sympathy" — implies shared experience. It literally means "to suffer with." This is not merely propositional awareness but genuine experiential understanding. The God who knows our pain from the inside is a very different comforter than a God who merely observes it from an infinite distance.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has expressed this point with searing personal power. After the death of his son Eric in a mountain climbing accident, Wolterstorff wrote in Lament for a Son that his only comfort was the conviction that God Himself grieves — that the God who made Eric and loved Eric was not watching his death from a distance of undisturbed bliss, but was genuinely, deeply, agonizingly affected by the loss. For Wolterstorff, the God who suffered the death of His own Son on the cross is a God who understands grief from the inside — and that understanding is what makes God's comfort real, not theoretical. "God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers," Wolterstorff wrote. A God of propositional knowledge alone could not offer this kind of comfort. Only a God with experiential knowledge — a God who knows what it is like to lose a child — can truly comfort those who grieve.⁵²

Divine Empathy: God Entering Our Experience

The discussion of experiential knowledge leads naturally to one of the most important — and most debated — concepts in the passibility discussion: divine empathy. Just how much experiential knowledge does God have? In particular, does God share in the emotional experiences of His creatures? Does He "feel our pain" in any real sense? Mullins addresses this question at length, and it is a question that will be developed further in Chapter 24 when we deal with the fascinating "creepy emotions" problem. But we need to introduce the concept here, because it is central to understanding what divine passibility really means.²⁶

The philosopher Linda Zagzebski has argued that God must possess what she calls omnisubjectivity — the property of consciously grasping with perfect accuracy and completeness the first-person perspective of every conscious being. In simpler terms, God understands each person's inner experience from the inside, not merely from the outside. He does not just observe that you are grieving — He understands what it is like for you to grieve, from your perspective, with perfect accuracy.²⁷

Why does Zagzebski think God must have this quality? Because it flows from omniscience — or what she calls "maximal cognitive perfection." If God truly knows everything, then He must know the first-person perspective of every creature. And to truly know a person's first-person perspective, you need empathy. As Zagzebski explains, empathy is the way we make the emotional states of others intelligible to us. Without it, we cannot truly understand what another person is going through. And without that understanding, we cannot make fair and accurate moral judgments about them.²⁸

This is a crucial point. Empathy is not just an emotional luxury — it is a moral necessity. A judge who sentences a criminal without any understanding of what drove the criminal to crime, or what the crime did to the victim from the inside, is not being a wise judge. He is being a disconnected one. If God is the ultimate moral judge of all creation, then He must understand every creature's perspective — and that requires empathy.²⁹

But what exactly is empathy? This needs some careful unpacking, because the word gets used in many different ways. At its core, empathy involves a transfer of emotion from one person to another. But it is important to distinguish empathy from emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is when you unconsciously catch someone else's emotion — like walking into an angry mob and suddenly finding yourself agitated without knowing why. That is not empathy. Empathy is conscious and deliberate. It involves understanding what another person is feeling, gaining a sense of what their experience is like from the inside, while remaining aware that your emotions are your own and not identical to the other person's.³⁰

This distinction is vitally important for understanding divine empathy. When we say that God empathizes with our suffering, we do not mean that God loses Himself in our experience. God does not become confused about who He is. He does not lose His own perspective. He does not agree with every emotional judgment we make. When a depressed person feels hopeless, God may empathize with that person — He may genuinely understand and share in the pain of the hopelessness — but God never becomes hopeless, because God also knows His own plan for that person's future. His empathy is always paired with His own wisdom, His own perspective, and His own moral evaluation.³¹

This is what makes God such a powerful comforter. When Paul writes that God is "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction" (2 Corinthians 1:3–4, ESV), he is not describing a detached observer who sends help from a distance. He is describing a God who enters into our affliction, who understands it from the inside, and who comforts us not with cold information but with the warmth of genuine shared experience. This is the pastoral power of divine passibility — and it is something that strict impassibility simply cannot provide.

Now, divine empathy does raise some interesting philosophical puzzles. Does God share in every emotion of every creature? Including morally problematic emotions? We will address these puzzles in Chapter 24, where we will consider the "creepy emotions" problem in detail. For now, the key point is this: divine empathy — understood rightly, as conscious, deliberate, and non-identity-destroying — is a coherent and powerful concept. It shows us a God whose knowledge of us is not merely theoretical but deeply personal. He does not just know about us. He knows us.³²

God's Self-Sufficiency and the Freedom of Divine Passibility

One of the most important things the neoclassical theist must establish is this: divine passibility does not make God dependent on creation. This is where neoclassical theism carefully distinguishes itself from process theology. Process theology says that God needs the world to complete His being — that God and the world are mutually dependent, and that God's very existence is bound up with the existence of creation. The neoclassical theist emphatically denies this.³³

The passible God of neoclassical theism freely chose to create. He did not need to create. Nothing was missing from His essential nature that creation could supply. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoyed a complete, perfect, infinitely rich life of mutual love from all eternity — before any creature existed. God was not lonely. He was not bored. He was not lacking anything. Creation was an overflow of His goodness, not a remedy for His insufficiency.³⁴

But here is the key distinction: even though God did not need to create, once He freely chose to create, He also freely chose to be genuinely affected by His creatures. This is a sovereign, voluntary decision. God chose to enter into real relationships with real beings — and real relationships involve being genuinely responsive to the other. God's emotional life over time is, in this sense, partly influenced by what His creatures do. He genuinely responds to their faithfulness, their rebellion, their suffering, and their repentance. But this responsiveness is not imposed on God from the outside. It flows from His own free decision to love.³⁵

Here is an analogy that might help. Think of a strong, secure, emotionally healthy man who falls in love and gets married. Before marriage, he was entirely self-sufficient. He did not need a wife to be happy, stable, or fulfilled. But once he freely chose to love this woman and bind himself to her in covenant, her joys became his joys, and her sorrows became his sorrows. Her well-being genuinely affects him — not because he is weak or dependent, but because he has freely chosen to make her happiness matter to him. Is this a deficiency? No — it is the very essence of what it means to love. A man who marries a woman but refuses to let her joys and sorrows touch him is not strong — he is emotionally dead.

The passibilist says that something analogous is true of God. God did not need creation. But He freely chose to love creation — and in choosing to love, He chose to be affected. His essential nature remains entirely self-sufficient. But His relational and emotional life is genuinely responsive to His creatures. This is not a deficiency but a perfection. As Marcel Sarot has argued, a God who freely chooses to be vulnerable to His creatures is more loving — not less — than a God who is incapable of being affected by anything.³⁶

The Biblical Case for a God Who Feels

The philosophical arguments for passibility are strong. But for the Christian, the ultimate test of any theological position is Scripture. And here, the evidence is overwhelming. The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, portrays a God who genuinely feels — who loves with burning intensity, grieves over rebellion, rejoices over repentance, burns with righteous anger at injustice, and overflows with tender compassion for those who suffer. As we will see in the detailed biblical surveys of Chapters 11 through 21, over four hundred passages describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. The sheer volume of this evidence should give any impassibilist pause.

Let me offer just a brief preview here — a handful of passages that capture the emotional life of the passible God. (The full exegetical treatment of each emotion will come in the later chapters.)

Consider God's grief. Genesis 6:6 tells us that when God saw the wickedness of the human race before the flood, "the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (ESV). The Hebrew word translated "grieved" is 'atsav (עָצַב), which refers to deep pain, sorrow, and anguish. This is not a mild disappointment. It is gut-wrenching grief. And the text says it reached "to his heart" — to the very core of God's being.³⁷

Consider God's compassion. When Jesus saw the crowds, "he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9:36, ESV). The Greek word is splanchnizomai (σπλαγχνίζομαι), which comes from the word for intestines — it literally means "to be moved in one's gut." This is not a detached observation. Jesus — who reveals the Father's heart (John 14:9) — is viscerally affected by the suffering of the people He encounters.³⁸

Consider God's joy. Zephaniah 3:17 declares: "The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing" (ESV). Picture this: the almighty God — the one who spoke galaxies into existence — singing over His people with exuberant joy. This is not the language of undisturbed bliss. This is the language of passionate, expressive, overflowing delight.³⁹

Consider God's anger. Exodus 32:10 records God's furious response to the golden calf: "Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them" (ESV). The Hebrew for "burn hot" is charah (חָרָה), which describes the kindling or blazing of fire. God's wrath is not a cold, detached judicial calculation. It is a passionate, burning response to the betrayal of His covenant people.⁴⁰

Consider God's parental anguish. In Hosea 11:8, after describing Israel's rebellion, God cries out: "How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? ... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender" (ESV). The Hebrew describes God's heart literally "turning over" within Him — the language of inner turmoil, of a parent who loves a rebellious child so deeply that the thought of punishing them causes internal anguish.⁴¹

The classical theist must explain all of these passages — and hundreds more like them — as "merely anthropomorphic." They are figures of speech, metaphors, accommodations to our limited understanding. God does not really grieve. He does not really rejoice with singing. He does not really burn with anger. He does not really have His heart recoil within Him. All of these are ways of describing in human terms what is really an undisturbed, changeless, emotionless perfection. (We will address this anthropomorphism objection in detail in Chapter 6.)

The passibilist says: this is an enormous amount of Scripture to explain away. And the explanation offered — that God acts as if He grieves without actually grieving — raises troubling questions about divine honesty. If God consistently describes Himself as grieving, rejoicing, being angry, and feeling compassion, but none of these descriptions correspond to anything real in His inner life, then God is systematically misleading us about who He is. As John Peckham has argued, there is simply no biblical support for the doctrine of impassibility — and the burden of proof falls heavily on those who would deny what Scripture so pervasively and consistently affirms.⁴²

It is also worth noting that the emotional language of the Bible is not confined to one genre or one author. It is not as if one prophet got carried away with emotional imagery and the rest of Scripture corrects the excess. The emotional portrayal of God runs from Genesis to Revelation, from Moses to Paul, from narrative to poetry to prophecy to epistle. It appears in God's self-descriptions (Exodus 34:6–7, where God proclaims His own character as "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love"), in the reports of prophets who claim to have received direct revelation of God's inner life, and in the words of Jesus — who said plainly, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9, ESV). If the emotional Jesus reveals the emotional Father, then the classical theist faces a serious challenge: how can the Father be utterly impassible when the Son who reveals Him is so profoundly passionate?⁵³

Rob Lister has made an important observation in this regard. Even passibilists who claim to read Scripture more "naturally" must be careful to read it carefully. The goal is not to read every emotional passage with flat literalism — as if God's grief is identical to human grief in every way. The goal is to read them analogically: God's grief is genuinely real, but it is divine grief, not human grief. It is deeper, purer, more purposeful, and never out of control. The analogy points upward to a greater reality, not downward to a lesser one. God's love is not less than human love — it is infinitely more. God's anger is not less than human anger — it is infinitely more righteous and infinitely more measured. The passibilist does not flatten God down to our level. She lifts our understanding up toward His.⁵⁴

Walter Brueggemann, the influential Old Testament theologian, has written extensively about what he calls "God's pathos" in the prophetic literature. Drawing on the earlier work of Heschel, Brueggemann argues that the prophets bear witness to a God whose inner life is genuinely turbulent — not because God is unstable, but because God cares so deeply about His people and about justice that their rebellion causes Him real pain. Brueggemann contends that the classical tradition has often tamed this turbulence, smoothing out the rough edges of the biblical portrait to produce a God who looks more like a Greek philosophical ideal than the passionate, involved, sometimes anguished God of the Hebrew Scriptures. The passibilist argues that we need to let Scripture speak for itself — and when we do, we hear the voice of a God who genuinely feels.⁵⁵

The Moral Argument: Is a Passible God a Better God?

Beyond the biblical and epistemological arguments, there is a powerful moral case for divine passibility. Roberto Sirvent has developed this argument at length in Embracing Vulnerability, and it will receive its full treatment in Chapter 31 when we discuss the imitatio Dei — the ethic of imitating God. But the basic contour of the argument deserves mention here, because it cuts to the heart of what kind of God is truly worth worshiping.

Sirvent's core claim is that emotional vulnerability is constitutive of love and justice — meaning that love and justice cannot exist without it. Consider love first. On virtually every major philosophical account of love — love as robust concern for the beloved, love as valuing the beloved, love as union with the beloved, love as emotional identification with the beloved — you cannot truly love someone without being emotionally affected by what happens to them. A husband who claims to love his wife but is completely indifferent to her suffering, her joy, her hopes, and her fears does not really love her. He may perform acts of service. He may fulfill his obligations. But his heart is closed — and that is not love.⁵⁶

Now apply this to God. If God is strictly impassible — if nothing in creation can genuinely touch His inner emotional life — then in what sense does God love His creatures? The classical theist has an answer: God's love is expressed in His benevolent actions toward us, not in His emotional responses. God loves by doing good, not by feeling something. But the passibilist finds this unsatisfying. Actions without emotional engagement may constitute benevolence, but they do not constitute love — not in any sense of the word that we can recognize. A philanthropist who donates millions to charity but feels nothing for the people he helps may be generous. But he is not a lover of those people. Love, at its core, involves being genuinely moved by the other person — and an impassible God, by definition, cannot be moved.⁵⁷

The same argument applies to justice. Sirvent argues that true justice requires compassion (feeling with the oppressed), empathy (understanding the impact of injustice from the inside), and righteous anger (being genuinely moved to act by the reality of wrong). A judge who is emotionally detached from the suffering of victims and the wickedness of perpetrators is not an ideal judge — she is a deficient one. If God is the ultimate moral judge, His justice must include emotional engagement with the realities He judges. An impassible God may decree justice, but He cannot care about it — and a justice divorced from care is something cold and mechanical, not the burning, passionate justice of the God who says, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24, ESV).⁵⁸

The moral argument is not the whole case for passibility. But it is a powerful one, and it raises a question that every defender of impassibility must answer: Is a God who cannot be emotionally affected by anything — not by the suffering of children, not by the cries of the oppressed, not by the joy of the redeemed — really the God we find in the Bible? Is He really the God worth worshiping? I do not believe so. The God of the Bible is not an unmoved spectator. He is a passionate lover, a tender father, a righteous judge, and a jealous husband — and every one of those descriptions requires genuine emotional engagement.

Key Passibilist Voices: A Brief Survey

Before we conclude this chapter, it will be helpful to introduce some of the major scholars who have shaped the case for divine passibility. These thinkers will recur throughout the book as important conversation partners.

Abraham Heschel was a Jewish philosopher and theologian whose magisterial work The Prophets (1962) introduced the concept of divine pathos to modern theology. Heschel argued that the God of the Hebrew prophets is not the unmoved mover of Aristotle or the self-contained perfection of the philosophers. He is a God of passionate involvement — a God whose inner life is profoundly affected by human actions. The prophets, Heschel insisted, were not projecting human emotions onto God. They were receiving genuine revelation of God's pathos — His passionate care for His people, His grief over their rebellion, His burning desire for justice and righteousness. Heschel's work remains one of the most powerful articulations of what it means to take the biblical portrait of God seriously.⁴³

Terence Fretheim, an Old Testament scholar, has argued extensively that the Old Testament pervasively portrays God as genuinely suffering with and for His people. In The Suffering of God, Fretheim demonstrates that divine suffering is not a minor or peripheral theme in the Hebrew Bible — it is woven into the very fabric of God's relationship with Israel. God's suffering is not a weakness but an expression of His love. He suffers because He loves, and His love requires genuine emotional engagement with the ones He loves.⁴⁴

John Peckham is an important evangelical voice for what he calls "qualified passibility." In The Love of God: A Canonical Model, Peckham argues that God's love is "foreconditional" (God loved us before we did anything to deserve it) and "volitional" (God's love is a free choice, not a compulsion), yet also "genuinely responsive" (God's emotional engagement with us is real, not merely apparent). Peckham has been particularly forceful in pointing out that there is no biblical support for impassibility and that the burden of proof lies with those who would deny what Scripture so clearly teaches.⁴⁵

Marcel Sarot has done important philosophical work on the coherence of divine suffering. Sarot distinguishes between involuntary suffering (suffering that is imposed on you against your will) and free self-limitation (choosing to open yourself to being affected by others). Sarot argues that God's suffering is always of the second kind — it is the result of God's free, sovereign decision to be in genuine relationship with His creatures. This means that divine suffering does not compromise divine sovereignty. God is not a helpless victim of His own creation. He is a sovereign lover who freely chooses to let His creatures' joys and sorrows touch His heart.⁴⁶

Clark Pinnock, in his contribution to The Openness of God, argued powerfully for divine passibility. Pinnock wrote that God "does not simply rule over creation, he is moved and affected by what happens in history. Events arouse joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath in him."⁴⁷ However, Pinnock tied his passibilism to open theism — the view that God does not know future free choices. I part ways with Pinnock here. As noted earlier, I believe God knows the future exhaustively. But one does not need open theism to affirm passibility. As we will see in Chapter 25, genuine emotional responsiveness is fully compatible with exhaustive foreknowledge. A parent can know in advance that her child's surgery will be painful — and still weep when it happens.⁴⁸

Jürgen Moltmann is perhaps the most influential modern passibilist. In The Crucified God (1974), Moltmann argued that the cross is an event within the Trinity — that when Jesus died on Calvary, God the Father experienced genuine anguish and the Spirit proceeded from the shared suffering of Father and Son. Moltmann contended that a God who cannot suffer is a God who cannot love, and that the cross reveals the depth of God's passionate engagement with His creation. Moltmann will be a major conversation partner in Chapter 9 (on the modern revolution in passibility thinking) and Chapter 26 (on the cross). However, I must note a concern: Moltmann sometimes comes close to making suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature — as if God needs to suffer in order to be God. I reject this. God's suffering is a free, sovereign response to the world He created, not an eternal necessity. And Moltmann occasionally flirts with patripassianism (the heresy that the Father was literally crucified). The author's position is that the Father genuinely suffered at the cross — but He suffered as a Father watching His Son die, not as one who was Himself crucified.⁵⁹

D. A. Carson, the evangelical New Testament scholar, has contributed to the passibility discussion through his work The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Carson distinguishes five different ways the Bible speaks of God's love and argues that we must hold all five together without collapsing them. While Carson is more cautious than some passibilists and seeks to maintain aspects of the classical tradition, his careful biblical work demonstrates that God's love is genuinely relational and responsive — not merely a static attribute. Carson's nuanced approach represents the kind of careful evangelical engagement with this question that I find most helpful.⁶⁰

J. D. Kim has developed one of the most thoughtful mediating positions in recent scholarship. In Constructing a Mediating Theology, Kim argues that the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself, apart from creation) is impassible — the eternal love between Father, Son, and Spirit does not depend on anything in creation. But the economic Trinity (God as He engages with creation) is passible — God freely wills to be moved by the world. Kim's "dynamic reciprocity model" proposes that within the eternal life of God, the three persons both move and are moved by each other, and that this eternal pattern of active-passive love overflows into God's relationship with creation. Kim's work is especially important for the Trinitarian dimensions of the passibility debate, which we will explore in Chapter 27.⁶¹

Where Passibility Goes Too Far: A Preview of Limits

Before we close, I want to be honest about a concern. Not everyone who affirms divine passibility gets it right. Some passibilists have gone too far — compromising things that the Bible clearly teaches about God's greatness. It is important to be clear about where the lines are, because the strength of the passibilist case depends on maintaining these boundaries. Without them, passibility slides into positions that are just as problematic — in different ways — as strict impassibility. Here are the lines I believe we must not cross:

First, we must not compromise divine sovereignty. God is the Lord of all creation. He can act unilaterally when He chooses. He governs history and will bring it to the conclusion He has planned. A God who can only persuade but never act decisively is not the God of the Bible. He is not a fellow-traveler on history's journey, hoping things turn out well but unable to guarantee the outcome. He is the Lord who declares "the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10, ESV) and who works "all things according to the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11, ESV). Some process theologians cross this line — and that is one reason I reject process theology, as we will see in Chapter 5.⁴⁹

Second, we must not compromise divine omniscience. God knows everything — past, present, and future — exhaustively and completely. He is not learning as He goes. He is not surprised by anything. He does not make tentative plans that might need adjustment depending on how things turn out. Some open theists cross this line — and that is one reason I reject open theism. Genuine emotional responsiveness does not require ignorance of the future. A father who knows in advance that his daughter will be rejected by her first college of choice still hurts for her when the rejection letter arrives. His foreknowledge does not eliminate his empathy — it merely means he has been hurting longer.

Third, we must not compromise divine aseity. God does not need creation. His essential nature is entirely self-sufficient. Creation does not complete God or fill a gap in His being. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have enjoyed an infinitely rich, perfectly complete life of mutual love from all eternity. God created not because He was lonely, bored, or lacking — but because His overflowing goodness desired to share the gift of existence with creatures who could know Him and love Him in return. Some process theologians cross this line with their doctrine of a God who needs the world to be God. Charles Hartshorne went so far as to speak of the world as "God's body." That is not the God of the Bible, who created all things from nothing and sustains all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3).⁶²

Fourth, we must not make God a victim of His own creation. God's passibility is always free, sovereign, and voluntary. He is not at the mercy of His creatures' actions. He chooses to be affected — and He remains fully in control of His own emotional life. His grief is always purposeful. His anger is always measured. His love is always wise. God's emotions never overwhelm, destabilize, or control Him. Unlike human beings, who can be swept away by rage, paralyzed by grief, or blinded by infatuation, God's emotional life is always governed by His perfect wisdom and His unfailing moral character. This is the grain of truth in the impassibility tradition — and it is one we must preserve even as we reject the tradition's more extreme claims.⁶⁴

These are important guardrails. And they bring us back to the mediating position I outlined at the beginning of this book: God genuinely feels. He truly loves, truly grieves, truly rejoices, truly burns with righteous anger. But His emotions never overwhelm Him. He is sovereign over His affective life. In this qualified sense — and only this sense — we can affirm a form of impassibility. God is impassible in the sense that He cannot be overwhelmed, manipulated, or destabilized by anything. But He is passible in the sense that He genuinely feels, responds, and is affected by His creatures. That is our mediating position — and the rest of this book will develop it in detail.

Some readers might wonder whether this mediating position is really coherent. Can God be both passible and impassible at the same time? Is this not a contradiction? No — because the two claims operate at different levels. God is impassible with respect to His essential nature — His character, His purposes, His moral perfections never change, and nothing can threaten or destabilize them. But God is passible with respect to His relational engagement — His emotional responses to His creatures genuinely change as He interacts with them in history. His character is a rock. His heart is alive. These are not contradictions — they are complementary truths about a God who is both transcendent and immanent, both sovereign and intimately involved. As Kim has helpfully put it, God is impassible in se (in Himself) and passible ad extra (in His relationship with the world).⁶³

Conclusion: A God Worth Knowing

What kind of God do we find in neoclassical theism? We find a God who is majestic and tender. Sovereign and responsive. All-powerful and all-compassionate. A God who holds the universe in His hands — and who also weeps when His children suffer. A God who knows the end from the beginning — and who still rejoices when a lost sheep comes home. A God whose essential character never wavers — but whose heart genuinely moves with the rhythms of His creation.

This is not a weak God. This is the strongest God imaginable — because He is strong enough to love. Strong enough to be vulnerable. Strong enough to let His creatures' lives genuinely matter to Him, without ever being overwhelmed by the weight of that mattering.

The impassibilist pictures a God of granite — unchanging, unmoving, unaffected by anything. The passibilist pictures a God of fire — burning with love, blazing with righteous anger, glowing with delight, and radiating warmth to all who draw near. Granite is strong, yes. But fire is alive.

In the next chapter, we will draw a critical line. Process theology also claims to believe in a passible God — a God who genuinely feels and is affected by His creatures. But process theology crosses every one of the guardrails we have just established. It compromises sovereignty, omniscience, aseity, and divine freedom. It gives us a God who suffers with us but cannot save us. That is a bridge too far — and Chapter 5 will explain why.

But for now, let us rest in this: the God of the Bible is not a distant, unmoved deity watching the world from behind bulletproof glass. He is a Father who loves His children with a fierce and tender love. He hurts when we hurt. He celebrates when we celebrate. And He is working all things — including His own grief and joy — toward the day when He will wipe every tear from every eye, and sorrow and sighing will flee away (Revelation 21:4). That is the God of neoclassical theism. That is the God I believe we find in Scripture. And that is the God worth knowing.